MyVerbalOutlet

I was listening to the stackoverflow podcast  this morning when Jeff Atwood went off on an uninformed rant about the way that  github.com works. Jeff was complaining about network graph for the stackoverflow fork of the wmd JavaScript Markdown editor.

Jeff’s complaints showed a fundamental misunderstanding of how distributed source control works. Joel tried to explain to Jeff that in a DVC system forking or cloning a repository doesn’t mean anything unless the fork sends a pull request to the master repository to include its changes. Unfortunately Jeff couldn’t get past the way that github displays project forks on the network graph. If Jeff had spent some time becoming familiar with git and the concepts behind DVC systems the whole conversation wouldn’t have taken place.

Usually Jeff explores a concept in minute detail which is one of the reasons his blog became so popular. In this instance though he perform his usual exploration of a subject and it really showed. I hope he takes some time to become more familiar with DVC systems as they are a real boon to modern software development.

I couldn’t help myself and I went ahead and ordered Dust of Dreams by Steven Erikson. I really enjoy the Malazan books and I will post a review when I have finished the book.

I needed to use the LINQ Distinct operation on a list of objects today and I ran into the fact that Distinct doesn’t take a lambda expression. You have to create a class that inherits IEqualityComparer and implements both the Equals and GetHashCode methods. This seems like a real pain to me. Distinct should take a lambda expression like the rest of the LINQ operators.

I found a workaround by using GroupBy, First, and Select like so.

var distinct = collection
       .GroupBy(c => c.FilterProperty)
       .Select(c => c.First())

I wasn’t going to go anywhere near another Wheel of Time book because from my point of view the wheels had come off it a long time ago. No one involved in the Wheel of Time had lived up to their responsibilities not the publisher, author, or editor. The storyline got so out of the author’s control it had gotten up to eleven books and the end was nowhere in sight. When I heard that the author Robert Jordan past away after completing the eleventh book I figured that I would never read the conclusion to the story. However Robert Jordan knew he was ill and found another author to finish the series.

Brandon Sanderson had a written a stand alone debut novel Elantris and followed it up with the Mistborn Trilogy. I ended up reading all of Sanderson’s books and I loved them all. Sanderson is an imaginative writer who brings new approaches to the fantasy genre. If I hadn’t enjoyed reading Sanderson’s books as much as I did I would not have bought “The Gathering Storm”.

With Brandon Sanderson authoring the story now this was the Wheel of Time as it should have been written since book four of the series. There is much less of the overly verbose world building that plagued the Wheel of Time series. The female characters aren’t the one dimensional caricatures Robert Jordan turned them into. Brandon Sanderson did what needed to be done in “The Gathering Storm” he pared the story down and moved the plot forward.

The plot focused much more on the main character Rand something that has been missing from the storyline. Robert Jordan included so many minor characters in the books he wrote that giving them story time meant less time for the characters who drive the plot. Reading a Wheel of Time book by Robert Jordan had become an exercise in frustration because he wasn’t moving the plot forward. Sanderson balanced the story very well by developing the main character and the main supporting character’s stories. I read “The Gathering Storm” in a week and loved every minute of it.

“The Gathering Storm” isn’t the final volume of the Wheel of Time because there was no possible way to wrap up a story as big as the Wheel of Time in one volume. There are two more books to follow after “The Gathering Storm” and I am now looking forward to reading them and finally finishing The Wheel of Time.

I moved my site to a new VPS provider and I am pretty happy with the performance so far. I also fixed the mod_rewrite issue in the process so links work on my site now.